Re: SystemD ugly boot

cfr wrote:

It should be configurable for accessibility reasons. Red/green colour blindness is the most common form and people shouldn't have to recompile systemd in order to easily distinguish successes from failures.

You're neglecting to consider the fact that it's not just blobs of color, but colored letters, forming words, presumably in a language understood by the user, such that they can be read, and comprehended, to easily distinguish success from failure.

Which is not to say that, all things being equal, I don't agree that the color should be user-configurable.

Last edited by alphaniner (2012-09-21 18:51:22)

But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.-Lysander Spooner

Re: SystemD ugly boot

The messages systemd posts scroll by *fast*. Noticing a patch of a particular colour is nonetheless pretty easy. Scanning the output for a particular word would not be.

These messages are not, moreover, available post-boot as far as I can tell. So routinely checking through them at a slower pace is not an option either.

Of course, evidence of failure will show up elsewhere. But I take it the option to see these messages is intended to provide useful functionality. That particular functionality would be virtually useless to me if I couldn't easily distinguish success from failure *at a glance* i.e. without having to read the text before it disappears.

Also whether it is in a language understood by the user I'm not sure. systemd ignores the locale on my machine even for dates which most stuff manages to pick up whatever else is missing. No idea what it is like at supporting other languages.

Re: SystemD ugly boot

None of those give a record of the output produced during boot, though, do they? As I said, I realise that the information is available but it isn't available in that form. There's no equivalent of just reading /var/log/boot or running dmesg.

I'm not saying it isn't possible to filter the information in some way but I can't find an easy way to get just that output reproduced post-boot.

Re: SystemD ugly boot

"systemctl status" shows whatever the service output, which is also in the journal. I don't know if the boot screen in systemd shows any useful information (or only FAILED), but in the times of initscripts and no /var/log/boot, one had to stop the first vc from clearing to see what was going wrong during boot. That's why I like systemd - quick "systemctl status" shows me what I want to know about the service that failed, I don't even have to see boot messages (with "quiet", I see only fsck output; oh, serenity).

Re: SystemD ugly boot

Yeah, I think the idea behind "systemctl" "systemctl status" etc. are that the boot info is so rediculously fast that it requires that relevent info be contained somewhere else. So running a simple systemctl will give you an overview of all started services and systemctl status will tell you about specific services.

Re: SystemD ugly boot

I actually thought systemd had a better boot than initscripts. The colors and layout looks way less smudged, you can easier get a grasp on whats going on with systemd. Although I dont like to see a lot of uneccessary messages flash before my eyes when I boot so I use the quiet flag

Re: SystemD ugly boot

Fair point. Anyway, my perspective is probably skewed. My system is set up to retain the messages, and with KMV very few of them scroll off the screen.

But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.-Lysander Spooner

Re: SystemD ugly boot

alexanderthegre wrote:

Dang... The colors are in a header file... I'm not going to be able to change that without major modifications to the code. Or a better knowledge of C. Probably both.

I don't understand this. Did you see earlier in this thread where flyingsheep located the colors in the code, and the discussion with Trilby that followed? Constants in a header file should be the easiest thing to change. You don't have to modify the code, just change the header file and rebuild.

Re: SystemD ugly boot

Dang... The colors are in a header file... I'm not going to be able to change that without major modifications to the code. Or a better knowledge of C. Probably both.

I don't understand this. Did you see earlier in this thread where flyingsheep located the colors in the code, and the discussion with Trilby that followed? Constants in a header file should be the easiest thing to change. You don't have to modify the code, just change the header file and rebuild.

Oops, I probably should have phrased that better. Anyway, what I was trying to say was that I couldn't, (read: don't know how to) make it read from a file within a header such that the user could, edit a file in, say, /etc/systemd-colors.conf and change the colors there.

Re: SystemD ugly boot

Dang... The colors are in a header file... I'm not going to be able to change that without major modifications to the code. Or a better knowledge of C. Probably both.

I don't understand this. Did you see earlier in this thread where flyingsheep located the colors in the code, and the discussion with Trilby that followed? Constants in a header file should be the easiest thing to change. You don't have to modify the code, just change the header file and rebuild.

Oops, I probably should have phrased that better. Anyway, what I was trying to say was that I couldn't, (read: don't know how to) make it read from a file within a header such that the user could, edit a file in, say, /etc/systemd-colors.conf and change the colors there.

If it has to be rebuildt, it probably will not work to just have an option in a settings file in etc, right? Then something has to be done with the sourcecode so that systemd actually will read that file.

Re: SystemD ugly boot

I think that will work. It is the same code fragment that people in this thread have used earlier. But it will not make systemd read a settings file? Not as I can interpret atleast. It would be nice to actually let the user choose in a settings file which color to use with verbose boot.

Re: SystemD ugly boot

I have no problems with how it looks. However there's something wierd - around the time the desktop manager (lightdm in my case) service starts the log messages are cleared and started again. I mean that all the messages that have appeared until now are cleared and only new messages are shown (like for example how the desktop manager and other services are started). It's not much of a deal but it's kind of annoying.